featured interview:
John Vanderslice
(August 2005)
The Dramatis Personae for Pixel Revolt, John Vanderslice’s fifth full-length, includes a gung-ho soldier who’s shot in his opening moments of combat, an aspiring terrorist with quavering commitment to his anti-government cause, and a journalist seeking out deeper truths in the company of an Iraqi prostitute. But the protagonist of this particular drama, much more than the ones that preceded, is Mr. Vanderslice himself.
Taking some time for a friendly chat before an on-air radio appearance, Vanderslice discusses his shift from fiction to autobiography, his lyrical workshops with John Darnielle (Mountain Goats), and some of the influences and processes that helped make Pixel Revolt such a distinctive and pleasurable album.
I put the advance into my computer and iTunes did its thing where it pulls up the information automatically, and it decreed Pixel Revolt a “Hip Hop/Rap” album.
Yeah, I did that on purpose. (laughs) That’s the first thing I do on my records because I’m such a huge fan of hip-hop. I just want to be a hip-hop star.
Well, you’re in good company this week. This is the featured interview and, right next door, Public Enemy is the featured review.
Dude, that’s awesome. But I’m not worthy to be next to those guys. I want to be a hip-hop star, but I have no flow.
Not even enough for a B-side or something?
I think if I was coached by someone who really knew what they were doing, I could pull it off.
I’d read that about halfway through working on this album, you had a shift and veered from more fictional narratives to more autobiographical ones. Was there something specific that encouraged that shift?
The thing that encouraged that shift was that things in my personal life kind of fell apart. Writing about some far-flung narrator in Afghanistan or Iraq or Venezuela just seemed kind of disingenuous or fake. It became more clear that I had to write about my own life, which I have done on and off on my past couple records, but I don’t think I’ve ever immersed myself in writing specifically about what was happening to me at the time. Probably half of the record is totally straight-on autobiographical stuff.
Was that cathartic?
No, it makes it worse. (laughs) I think in the short-term it makes it worse because you concretize all these feelings and emotions, and that can mess you up because you’re forced to listen to these... there’s like a butterfly in amber kind of thing, you know what I mean? You’ve frozen in time these possibly passing and morbid thoughts. But I think that it was good for me as a writer to do that. I think it’s more honest to write that way.
John Darnielle receives a lyrical “workshop” credit on the record, which made me think of my collegiate writing workshop days. Was it that kind of thing?
Oh, yeah!
Sitting around a table and tearing into it?
Well, it was e-mail and phone conversations because John is in North Carolina. But, man, he was so key to me and so helpful in terms of upping the ante lyrics-wise. First off, because I knew everything I was writing was going through him. I think it changed the way I was writing initially. Darnielle has a pretty good bullshit detector. He’s an extremely bright and fast person, and we know each other really well, so I knew if I was going to get stuff past him, I was going to have to work hard before I sent it to him. He gave me a different perspective; sometimes he’d having me tear down songs, or he’d ask me, “What are you getting at? Nothing is clear here.” Then sometimes he would say, “This is finished—just change this one word.”
Was that a tough process? Was it a unique approach?
Oh, no, I’ve workshopped a lot of stuff in my past. I prefer to workshop. You just have to find someone that you really respect. Darnielle knows all of my stuff; he knows where I’m coming from. I respected that he could make “a better version of me,” in Fiona Apple terms.
Yeah, there needs to be a lot of trust when you take the gloves off like that.
Yeah, and ego-wise, we’re both pretty secure people, so it’s not like we’re worried about collaboration. For him, it was probably just a lark in the afternoon. But, for me, it was a super important connection.
One specific line I wanted to ask about was the Dance Dance Revolution reference in “Exodus Damage.” How did that come about?
I’ve been going to Japan and touring like once a year, and I just start getting into Japan and their video game culture – they have these five-level video gaming places that are the most unruly, noisy, anarchic places I’ve ever seen in my life. I just thought about the way that people interact with video games. There’s some aspect of a virtual life – there are video games where you go and capture Saddam Hussein or whatever. (laughs) None of this is a criticism of computers or video games, because I actually don’t have any problems with any of that stuff. But the narrator in the song is a wannabe anti-government activist, and his calling card is basically this video game where you have to dance your way through this maze.
And is that the only operable way that someone could use the word “revolution” today? That word is almost not even part of the dialog anymore. So this really disenfranchised, out-there, wannabe anti-government terrorist is lamenting the fact that all the revolutionary fervor is gone from the country – and, because of that, he’d rather just bomb the whole thing to bits.
Not necessarily my view, but obviously I have sympathies – anyone you write about, you have certain sympathies to, you know what I mean?
Absolutely. Hitchhiking off that, there’s also this tendency to portray real-life catastrophe in terms of a video game or a movie. Like you’d constantly hear people after 9/11 say, “It was like I was in a movie.”
Yeah, yeah, totally. You feel that, too, when you watch those tapes. It’s unbelievable.
In your recording diary online, you said that the process of sequencing the songs took quite a while. Does that come down to a gut feeling, or is it something more cerebral and conceptual?
Well, the only thing I knew that had to happen was that “Letter to the East Coast” had to be first, because it really felt like it was an introduction to the story of the album, and the last three songs had to fall in order because I really viewed them as three parts of one final song, a song about someone trying to come out the other side of some psychological dissonance. Everything else was tossed up, and it took so much time.
I think the hard thing was that there were so many songs, and it’s a much longer record that I’ve ever made. There’s actually a song that was left off the record called “The Kingdom” – that ended up being on the Japanese version and the vinyl – and I couldn’t break it with that song. Once that was pulled off, it became a lot easier to sequence. Now it seems to make sense, but I think whenever you put things in a certain order, it starts to make sense because you forget about the other ways.
Did you pull “The Kingdom” because it wasn’t working into the arc, or were there other factors?
Well, you know, it’s weird – stylistically, in many ways, “The Kingdom” should be on the record. It’s a song about someone who finds a way to live in post-apocalyptic America, but it’s a slow song, kind of a piano ballad, and the album, to me, was starting to bog down with that in the rotation. Also, I think it’s kind of exciting to have a vinyl-only track.
Who’s involved in those sequencing decision?
I’m very open in the way that I work. I have my crew—probably five people—and Darnielle was in on that, too. Usually he and I are on the same page exactly, but every sequence he sent me was completely the opposite of what I was thinking. (laughs) In many ways, it was probably the intersection of all our lists. I’m not a proprietary guy. I don’t see it as some sort of sacred thing that I have to pass down to the label. I see it as a collaborative effort from top to bottom, from the engineers I work with—like Scott Solter—to the musicians.
Are you involved with the day-to-day operations of Tiny Telephone [his studio] as you’re writing and recording?
(laughs) Yeah. Someone should sue me for neglect. I’m so often out of town and doing other stuff, but the good thing is that I have a great crew of engineers down there who have really learned how to run the place without me. They probably secretly like that I’m not around because they get to do whatever they want to do, and they certainly stay busy. When I’m home, I’m at the studio almost every single day. I’m a very mellow studio owner, and usually studio owners are very, very neurotic and controlling and intense.
In the last few interviews I’ve done, there’s been a recurring theme of bands who are on their second or third album and are saying, “We’re really happy with this one because we finally got the production right.” Is that something bands have to go through themselves, trial by error, or is there a way to nail it coming out of the gates?
Well, I think that even when you think you have it right, there are still so many problems and variables. Literally, things can go wrong in an area that you’ve never considered. Musicians, for instance, play very differently when they’re inside a studio versus playing live. They buy new equipment and their tones change. Studios change. And engineers lose their chops, man. I’ve seen some engineers actually get worse with time.
The shortlist of things that I see going wrong for a band in the beginning—or really in any stage—is first that they choose the wrong engineer, someone who really doesn’t have the chops to deal with the type of music the band is doing. Two, the band needs to hold their end of the bargain up and actually try to improve their equipment. Most of the reasons why records sound band is that the bands usually have really bad equipment—just total garbage—and no one has ever told them that. It’s a hard thing to tell someone because you’re telling someone that they need to go out and spend four thousand dollars. That’s a mean thing to say, but that’s the price. This is a foolish game to be in if you’re not willing to be totally committed to doing good stuff.
When people hear Kinks records or Zombies records or Zeppelin records and get excited, they’re kind of in fantasyland about how much money is being thrown at those records. They just don’t realize that Jimmy Page had a collection of 75 amplifiers and 19 Les Pauls.
Do you ever burn out on music?
I do when I’m recording my own record. If I’m in the middle of a record, I really only listen to jazz or classical music. I’d rather watch movies. I’m so heavily immersed that I feel like I’m trapped if I think about music too much. But once a record is done, I go back to my usual schedule of listening to a lot of music every day.
Speaking of movies, since you’re a film buff and I’m down in Hollywood, we obviously have to talk cinema! I’ve seen interviews where you’ve mentioned directors like Lars Von Trier and David Lynch. Do you have fondness for the cheese, too?
Oh, I have not a snobbish bone in my body. I have no problem with high or low – I don’t see the difference. You’d be hard-pressed to tell me whether Preston Sturgis was a high-brow or low-brow director. Certainly the Coen Brothers could fall into that, too. But, yeah, Groundhog Day might be my favorite movie of all time, and I just saw Anchorman and (laughs) I thought that was really, really funny. I have a soft spot for Will Ferrell in general.
Are you the type who maintains a meticulous list of things to check off?
I don’t do that. I’m so impulsive, and I see things and don’t remember that I’ve seen them, then I rent them again. I’m kind of messy about all of the stuff that I’ve seen. I used to have a list of the movies I’d seen, but I stopped. I’m just too disorganized. I should – that would be fantastic.
Did you ever flirt with a career in film or one of the other artistic disciplines?
I really consider film too difficult to do. The funding pressure, the number of collaborators – making records is hard enough for me, and I think it’s much easier than making a movie. Plus, I’m really not a multidisciplinary person. I really believe that we have to do one thing and try to figure it out and do it as best as we can.
What’s a pet cause of yours that you feel is neglected or overlooked by the public?
Electronic freedom is a big deal. I’m surprised by how little it’s covered by the mainstream media, not only the stuff that the Electronic Freedom Foundation deals with, but stuff having to do with censorship or with copyright and trademark stuff, peer-to-peer…there’s a lot going on right now. I think that the more the government has a foot in regulating what happens electronically, it’s generally for the worst. I’m worried that they’re going to start going after news servers now, and I’m surprised that more of my peers aren’t worried about it, to be honest.
— Interview by Adam McKibbin
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